Gerry Atwell oral history transcript

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INTERVIEW WITH GETTY ATWELL
BY THOMAS GOETTEL JUNE 20, 2001
MR. GOETTEL: It’s June 20, 2001 and we are at Gerry Atwell’s house in Searsmont,
Maine. Gerry is a long-time Fish and Wildlife Service employee, now retired. He is a
Biologist. It’s a beautiful summer day here. We are overlooking his small farm, or his
medium farm, I guess and his pond, hummingbirds and Lupines, and everything. So
Gerry, I know that you are from Framingham, Massachusetts.
MR. ATWELL: Yes.
MR. GOETTEL: How did you get into wildlife? How did you start off in your career?
MR. ATWELL: Well, in Framingham when I was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s it
was a rural situation, unlike what Framingham is today. I spent a lot of time, as soon as I
could walk, out in the woods, or around ponds and streams around our home. My folks
encouraged my interest in wildlife. My Dad built me a special cage for snakes, and we
had an old bathtub, which we sunk into the ground out in back for turtles. I had
Salamanders and the whole works. It was awful easy to continue that interest. I can still
remember the day that my folks told me that they had learned about a situation where the
states used people that were called Biologists, and you went to school for it. I was about,
maybe twelve years old at the time so that really sparked an interest in me. Through my
high school years I worked and took classes that were designed so that I could go on to
college, which I did, at the University of Massachusetts. In 1954, I graduated with
bachelors in Wildlife Management, and went into the Service [military], as a tank unit
commander with the First Armored Division. After a couple of years there, I came back
out and tried to get a job in wildlife, in Massachusetts. At that time, the head of the
wildlife section told me that they weren’t hiring any wildlife biologists at the time, but
they were going to bring on some fisheries biologists the next spring. He suggested that I
get some fisheries courses. I called up the University of Massachusetts and told them
what the situation was, and they said, “Sure, come on back up to graduate school.” So,
two days later, I was up there at the graduate school. I took fisheries courses there in
1956, and 1957. But then I realized through one of the professors that I was working
with, Tom Andrews, (he was a wonderful person). He encouraged me to go on for a
master’s degree. I decided that I would, but rather than fisheries I was interested in
upland, or big game. I ended up going to the University of Montana to work with John
Craighead at the Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit there in a study involving Magpie
predation on Pheasants in the Bitterroot Valley. I did that for two years, and I got my
master’s in December of 1959, and took a position in the Alaska Depart of Fish and
Game as the Assistant Regional Management Biologist in Anchorage. The staff was very
small at that time. The office for the whole region, and there were three regions in the
state, was two enforcement officers and about four or five biologists, plus the secretaries.
Two or three of the Biologists were fisheries biologists; they were divided into
commercial fisheries and sport fisheries. We had a small group of people, but it was
tremendously interesting. It seemed that no sooner had I arrived than I was made
responsible for the first, either-sex Moose season on the Kenai Peninsula for years and
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years and years. That really got my attention because I had to coordinate this particular
hunt with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Alaska Command, the military. It
was a pretty big operation and I was real nervous, but it went well. It was a good hunt.
Quite a large number of animals were taken under fairly severe conditions. People were
hunting at twenty [degrees] below. They were local people of course, so they knew how
to take care of themselves in that type of weather, so it worked out well. We had a lot of
challenges, and in wasn’t long before I was the acting Regional Management Biologist.
From there I went to be the State Biologist for Moose, in Alaska. I traveled over much of
the state, and it was extremely interesting. We had all kinds of different experiences. I
did a lot of flying, of course.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you fly, yourself?
MR. ATWELL: No. I never did. I had a problem with kidney stones, which I still have
to this day. And as you well know. . .
MR. GOETTEL: I seem to remember that.
MR ATWELL: I can be O.K. one minute, and not so great the next. So I wouldn’t make
a good pilot in that respect. But I did do a lot of flying, and game counts. We’d get sex
and age composition counts of Moose each fall, and we’d count several thousand Moose.
We were quite good and sexing and aging them from the air.
MR. GOETTEL: Aging them too?
MR. ATWELL: Yes, within reason. I mean, we could say whether they were adults, or
calves or yearlings and that sort of thing. I was never in a plane that had any real serious
problems. Some of our people crashed landed, and we couldn’t contact them for several
hours and we were real concerned about that. The plane was destroyed, but they came
out of it all right, with no serious injuries. I know a time I went down to the McNeal
River. It is a state-owned area where the Brown Bears congregate in the summer when
the Salmon are going upstream. At that time, we’re talking about 1960, there was hardly
anybody coming in to watch them. Now I guess you have to make reservations a year or
two in advance, and it is very strictly controlled. I was just dropped off there, by a fellow
in an airplane and there was a Stream Guard. Stream Guards were people who were
summer hires by the State, to monitor fishing streams, particularly the mouths of rivers
where commercial fishing boats could come in and really create havoc taking fish as they
were about ready to migrate up the rivers. The fish would congregate there. The
fishermen could wipe out practically a whole run, so they had to be watched. There was
a fellow there who was a Stream Guard, he had a little cabin, and I staid with him for a
week. It was tremendously interesting for me. It was the first time, other than in
Yellowstone with the Craigheads that I had been around big Bears. There were
sometimes thirty or forty Bears at one time at the falls. We would meet them on the trails
and paths. It was just extremely interesting work. I had a lot of interesting projects.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you have any close calls with the Bears at all?
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MR. ATWELL: Not there. I did later, on Kodiak. But when you are around them a lot,
you get to know what to look for, and they give you body language and certain sounds
that mean that maybe they are upset and you want to back away. I carried a 357 Magnum
with me at that time. One day, the Stream Guard and I decided that we were going to
have some Salmon for supper. We went up the river a ways, and waded out. We had hip
boots on, and were fishing to catch Salmon. I heard him say, “Hey, Gerry, I think you’d
better get you gun out”! I looked over my shoulder, and here was two cubs, just running
lickety-split right towards us. We were evidently in their favorite fishing spot. They
were cubs of a year, and the female was coming up behind them. She saw us but the cubs
didn’t. She wanted to get between us and the cubs. So she was barreling right in at us.
There was no way that I would use that pistol to try stop the Bear at all. I did take it out,
as I recall. I was going to shoot up into the air if I had to. We just backed up into the
water where it was deeper and once she between the cubs and us, she was fine. She just
herded them along. But that was the only instance there. One day I walked down the
beach, by myself. There was a huge pile of boulders that fallen off of the cliffs nearby.
These boulders were half the size of a good-sized house and there was just a huge mound
of them. The tide was out, and I was walking along there, and all of a sudden this mighty
roar came out! [Makes a Bear roaring sound] It was like a domestic Bull. I didn’t realize
it, but there were two, two year old cubs that were littermates that were in amongst these
boulders. They were just playing and one of them roared at the other. I couldn’t see
them and so that got my attention real fast. But they never came out. I did see them later
in the day. They came up the beach, and I assumed that it was the same Bears. They are
just not that aggressive. They are easy to get along with. They have people now that go
up to the McNeal Falls, and I don’t know how many people a year because it’s such a big
thing. They are limited, I think by permit. But I know of no instances up there, where
people have been hurt by the Bears. I worked later on Kodiak, and when I was there in
the 1970s there were only a couple of instances on record of people being hurt by the
Bears. They were just minor situations like when a trapper walked out into a stream
where a sow with cubs was feeding and he just walked right out of the Elders and he was
right on the Bears. The sow turned around and slapped him, and knocked him down.
She opened up his arm a little bit, and bit into the pack on his back and walked away.
Then a few years later, a fourteen or fifteen year old fellow was out hunting deer. He was
hunting upwind near a Salmon stream. And again, he walked onto a sow with cubs. She
knocked him down, and bit him once and walked away. I think he was in the hospital
overnight. But that’s pretty amazing, with that tall grass and all that, and people are
walking through that all of the time. We were around the Bears a lot, every day pretty
much, when we were in the field. Again, they are just like people. Each one has it’s own
personality. And if there is one that is a rough and tough three-year-old, then you’re
going to kind of give him birth. Most of the older ones have been around people to some
extent and they back off, or they come at you, and you back off. The only real spooky
time I had was once I was coming out of the mountains by myself, and I didn’t have a
gun with me. There were just some Elders and Willows around and there was an opening
about fifty or sixty yards long. There was a bear towards the other end of the opening
where I wanted to go. I yelled at him to get his attention so he would get out of the way,
so that I could go by. Well, he ran at me, and normally if they do that you just wave your
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arms and yell, and they’ll stop. I did that, and he didn’t stop. He kept coming, and
another one came behind him, so there were two running at me. I thought, “Well, this is
going to look great”. I was Refuge Manager at Kodiak at the time, and I could see it the
newspapers. You know, “Refuge Manager Gets Mauled by a Bear”! That was the last
thing that I wanted. So I turned around, and looked over my shoulder. There was a little
opening in the willows behind me. There was a ditch, just before they would get to me,
and I thought that when they got to that ditch, I would turn around and go back to that
opening and yell again. And if they continue on I’ll just roll up in a ball. So I ran back,
and whirled around, and they went roaring down into that ditch and they didn’t come out.
I couldn’t believe it. I staid there for a few seconds, I didn’t yell any more! I just turned
around and walked away, rather fast. It kind of unnerved me a little bit. But that was the
only time felt concerned out of all of the time we were around bears. I had other ones run
at me, but they were “bluff” charges. And this one, at the time, didn’t seem that it was a
bluff charge. It was during the breeding season, so I think it was a male with a female,
and he was guarding the female and didn’t want me around. No, there was no problem
with the bears. Although people have been killed by them, and I guess there always will
be [problems] unfortunately. Because we’re in his or her habitat, and as I say, each bear
is an individual and has an individual psychological makeup. There’s going to be ones
that are going to be more aggressive.
With the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, we worked on Moose each spring.
From helicopters, we would tag about two hundred calves each spring. We wanted to
follow a certain population in the [sounds like] Matanuska valley. I learned very quickly
then, that each of them is a different animal too. Because some of the cows, as soon as
they heard the helicopter, would run and leave the calf. Then there were some who, no
matter how big the helicopter was, even if we used a huge military Skorskis, with two
blades, one on each end, they wouldn’t leave. They’d just turn around, and pivot on their
hind feet and paw at the helicopter, even though it was fifteen, or twenty times bigger
than the Moose. We learned to just leave those Moose alone. Most of them would just
run a short distance when the helicopter came in. The calf would drop and we’d jump
out. But you had to jump into the muskeg. The helicopter couldn’t land because it was
so wet. Then you would try to run through the muskeg and catch the calf. When the calf
was less than a week old you could normally catch it without too much of a problem. But
you got awful tired; we would start at about two o’clock in the morning. This was around
the 25th, 26th or 27th of May when most of the Moose calves were being dropped and were
available to us. We had a military newspaper correspondent type person come out with
us one morning. He wanted some pictures, and he had his camera slung over his back.
We started to chase a calf after we jumped out of the helicopter, and I looked behind me
to see how he was doing, and just as I did, he tripped and he went headfirst into the mud.
His camera, I remember, came flying up over his head into the water. He never asked to
come back again. A lot of people thought that it was going to be fun. In a sense it was,
but it was very fatiguing. And after about the second of third Moose calf, we would
frequently loose our breakfast, because we were just so tired and using so much strength
up. It worked very well, and we learned a lot about that particular population through the
calves that we tagged.
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MR. GOETTEL: So you darted them from the helicopter?
MR. ATWELL: No. We just ran them down. We started a new population too, down at
Burnis Bay with a few of the calves. It was an area that was cut off by glaciers and there
was no Moose population. It is in southeastern Alaska in the panhandle. We took with
the help of the National Guard, twelve Moose calves down there and it worked extremely
well. They were liberated there after being partially raised. They have a fine population
of Moose down there now, and they have for quite a while.
MR. GOETTEL: Do you want me to let her in? [Opening door for Mr. Atwell’s pet] You
said that there were only four or five biologists for your area. That must have been a
huge area.
MR. ATWELL: Yeah, it was. I don’t know how many thousands of square miles. I
know that we worked with Wolves too, but it was mainly just a census thing. I know of
one Wolf study area we had was twenty-six thousand square miles. They were big areas.
There were three Regional Management Biologists at that time in the state. There was
one for the Artic, one for the central and one for the southern part of Alaska. I happened
to be working in the central area with included the Aleutians. It was a tremendous area.
We had to fly because there just weren’t that many roads. So we did a lot of flying.
MR. GOETTEL: So you did wolf work too?
MR. ATWELL: Just census work. The populations were pretty low then because there
was a bounty of fifty dollars a head on them. In addition, the Service and hit them pretty
hard with poison for a number of years. But they did come back. I worked for the Fish
and Wildlife Service quite a bit on census work, down on the Kenai. I working with
them on the hunting and fishing regulations each year, and management. Dave Spencer
was Refuge Manager at Kenai at the time, and I’d meet with them once or twice a year,
and discuss what regulation we would work up affecting the refuge. That was such a
large area too. One year we decided to make it illegal to hunt wolves down there and in a
sense, it didn’t help right away because there were no wolves. They had been extirpated
from the Kenai. But after a few years, the wolves had found their way back in and we
built up a good Wolf population down there. Since then there have been several detailed,
lengthy studies on Wolves in Kenai. But anyways, I could go on and on talking about my
work with the Alaska Fish and Game Department. Jim Brooks was my immediate
supervisor most of the time. He was an extremely talented and dedicated person. I think
he left home when he was about fifteen or sixteen, and rode a freight car out west and
ended up in Alaska. He was just an amazing person. Much of the big and small game
management that was accomplished can be attributed to his direction.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you work much with the native populations?
MR. ATWELL: No. I didn’t. I did on Kodiak, but not when I was working out of
Anchorage. I left there in September of 1963, and went back to Montana. I took a
position as an Assistant Unit Leader with John Craighead, at the Montana Cooperative
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Wildlife Research Unit at Missoula, Montana. That was very enjoyable too, because I
had known John from my graduate work. Much of my responsibility was with graduate
students, and with the administration of the Unit. I also worked some in research. I had
an Elk project in Yellowstone Park with the north Yellowstone Elk herd. I was
determining their summer range. That was extremely interesting. When I was down
there for summers; you’d just take a pack on your back and leave on a Monday and come
back on a Friday or Saturday. We would just go out and be with the Elk. We had
marked Elk with color-coded collars. We could individually identify an Elk with these
collars. Much of the time, that’s what I was doing. Once in a while I would take a
graduate student with me or maybe a student from another country, we had quite a few
from Africa. These were students who were interested in wildlife, and taking wildlife
courses, so they would accompany me. It wasn’t a real sophisticated study. It was sort of
like the old naturalist type studies where you get out with the animals and live with them.
There wasn’t any electronics involved, but we got a lot of good information and mapped
the summer ranges. I was pleased with that. I would work at times with John and Frank
Craighead on the Grizzly Bear work in Yellowstone. I had been to Yellowstone in 1947
and 1948, and it’s always been a very special place to me. I go back there as much as I
can. I was there last fall, and it’s just like going home. My wife Linda feels that same
way about it. She’s been there enough. It’s a wonderful spot, just fantastic. I remember
one time when I had the weekend off, and on Saturday I went down in the Haden Valley.
I just put a pack on, and took a lunch for the day. I also took camera equipment. I was
walking along, and I saw a Grizzly coming towards me across Sagebrush flat. With the
wind direction, I knew that he was going to get my scent before long. I set up my 400
mm telephoto lens on a tripod and followed him in. And sure enough, all of a sudden he
just stopped, dead in his tracks, and stood up on his hind legs. I was able to take a picture
of him. I liked that. And then he turned around and of course he ran like crazy. That
same day, and this was in the summer time, I think it was in July; I could see a wall of
white coming across the Haden Valley. I thought, “Oh boy, we’re in for a real shower”.
There was a thermal pool, or a stream actually, near by. I took out my thermometer and
followed the stream until it was about 106 or 106 degrees and took off my clothes and put
them under my poncho and got in the stream and laid back. The rain came, only it wasn’t
rain, it was snow. It was snowing and snowing like crazy! And I was in there for about
an hour, and there was about three inches of snow. I said, “Well, this is absurd. I’ve got
to walk out of here”! But the last thing that I wanted to do was to get out of that nice,
warm water in that snowstorm. Well, I figured that I had about five or six mile to walk
out so I had to do it. And I could feel each and every one of those snowflakes hit me
when I got out. {Laughing] So I was a little wet. I walked out, and came up on some Elk
that were bedded down and I didn’t even see them until they all stood up because they
were all covered by snow. You can get snow in Yellowstone any month of the year
although normally you don’t get that much at that time of the year.
But you are up seven or eight thousand feet. [Above sea level] I enjoyed working at the
University of Montana very much. They had great people there. Les Bengali and just a
whole bunch of fine people were there. I knew quite a few people in the Bitterroot
Valley. Linda and I are still friends with a rancher there. We just saw him last year. He
is just like a member of the family, a wonderful person. He has people up at Nine Mile
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that have a ranch. I guess you make friends as you move. And with the Service, and with
the State government, I moved quite a bit.
In 1968, I took a position in the Philippines. They were starting the Rodent Research
Center on Las Bagnios, about thirty miles east of Manila. It was adjacent to the
International Rice Research Institute. There were three of us from the States. There was
Nelson Swank, who was the Supervisor. He was a control=methods biologist. And there
was Keith Lavoie, a toxicologist, and myself as an ecologist. We worked with Philippine
counterparts on the Rice Rats. The Rice Rats, at that time were taking about ten percent
of the national production of rice in the Philippines. We worked with Les Somangil, and
Justiniano Labye [names of Philippine nationals] who were wonderful Philippine people.
They were very gifted biologists and scientists. We had research studies in many parts of
the Philippines, and very early on realized of course that these rodents weren’t going to
be wiped out, or extirpated. They were going to be managed, as happens with most
wildlife species, that because of the particular situation have been labeled as pests.
Although these were fine little critters.
MR. GOETTEL: They were native rats?
MR. ATWELL: Yes. These animals lived on grasses at the edge of the jungle. And
there probably weren’t that many of them until about three thousand years ago when
people came in and started clearing the jungles and planting rice crops. Rice is grass of
course. The rats could live in the dikes and come out at night and feed on the rice. And
they did very well. Man had changed the environment and it suited the rats better. My
job pretty much was determining how far they would move in a night, or in a certain
period of time. And, how many litters they would have. And how large the litters would
be. We just studied when they were most active, when they would feed on the rice.
Actually, they would start to feed on the rice before the rice panicle came out, when it
was still in what’s called a booting stage. They could smell it, and sense that it was there.
They would feed on it before you’d even see the rice itself. They could do a lot of
damage in one night. We radioed them. We had small radios. We worked through the
Denver Wildlife Research Center, and they trained us in the use of all of this equipment.
We would be out at first light, depending on the particular project. One problem that we
had in the rice patties was Cobras. You never reached into a rat burrow, because that’s
where the Cobras would be. And they were Spitting Cobras, so if they did come out, you
didn’t want to harass them because they could eject their venom. They could
instinctively point it towards your face. It wouldn’t kill you if you got it in your eyes but
you could get some severe eye damage if you didn’t get it diluted right away. They
weren’t aggressive. Now, if you harassed them they were, but they just tried to get out of
your way. You could see them if the rice, or the grass would move and they would sense
that you were there. I always wore boots up to my knees. In fact, I’ve got them right
downstairs. I still use them. I call them my “Cobra Boots”.
MR. GOETTEL: Are they leather boots?
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MR. ATWELL: No. Just a real thick rubber, and they weren’t specially made for that. I
bought them in a market over there and they were very well made. I had them on, just
yesterday out doing something around the yard, when it was still wet. Unfortunately the
Philippine people wouldn’t wear anything on their feet, maybe just some clogs. They
would go out at night, particularly if they were changing water depths in the patties. The
snakes were out more at night and they would step on them and things like that. One
time we had a new driver. You didn’t drive yourself, over there. You had government
drivers because of all of the problems you could get into if you were in an accident.
Some drivers were just extremely aggressive. It was just a whole different way of life.
We had a new driver from Manila, Vero Plant Industry. We came out and we were just
coming into the study area, and a fellow came staggering out. He had just been bitten by
a Cobra. It was evidently a while since it had happened, and he collapsed and later died.
That was the one time that the driver went out into the field. He refused to drive for us
any more. He went back to Manila. He was just with us one day. Most of the time you
didn’t have a problem. That was fairly unusual, although they do loose quite a few
people from snakebites from different kinds of snakes. We did carry anti venom with us
for a while, but it got to be too much of a problem. It had to be refrigerated, and it just
wasn’t something that we kept on doing. The Philippine people were great to work with.
We went off into villages, and they still remembered the Americans from liberation, and
they couldn’t do enough for you. The kids would run up beside your Jeep when you
came in. And they would be yelling, “Hey Joe, Hey Joe”! I remember one fellow who
worked with us for quite a while; he was probably about fifty years old then. And on his
chest, he had tattooed, “One by one Joe”. We asked him what that meant. He was a
guerilla from the Second World War. “Joe” was the United States soldier, and that they
had killed the Japanese, one by one. At that time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s I
wouldn’t have wanted to be a Japanese out in the villages, or out in the provinces. It
would not have been safe because of the terrible things that they did when they were
there. Our neighbors where we lived; her sister’s family was put into a small “neepa”
hut, and it was lit on fire. When they tried to run out, the Japanese shot all of the kids and
everyone else. One of our drivers, Anghel Razad [Philippine name] was put into a small
“neepa” hut with about thirty people; thirty other men. They were kept there for
something like three days without any water. And in that heat, some of the men were
drinking their own urine. These people didn’t have very good thoughts about the
Japanese.
MR. GOETTEL: What is a “neepa” hut?
MR. ATWELL: It’s made out of thatch, up off of the ground, frequently on stilts. It’s
made out of Palm branches. The people in the Philippines were just wonderful. It was
just a tremendous experience. My wife worked in a couple of the villages building up
libraries. They had no libraries, and she contacted people in the States and they sent in
all kinds of books. Education and books were so important to the people there. They
appreciated it so much. I know that when we left, they had a party for us in the
compound. And all of our friends from the local villages came in. Some of them were
elders, or older people, and some of them could not speak English. Most everywhere we
went in the Philippines, we could find people who spoke English. But anyway, they went
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through a wailing process, the older people did. It was just unearthly. It was
unbelievable. The noises that these people, and the women made, the wailing. I have
never heard anything like it since.
MR. GOETTEL: That was because you were leaving?
MR. ATWELL: Yeah. And one of them had a poem that she wrote, and it was translated
for us. She wrote it in her mind, she didn’t have it on paper. And it just had our whole
family in tears. It was such a beautiful thing, and I just wish, I have always wished that
we could have somehow gotten a copy of that. It was just amazing. It was very difficult
for us to leave.
MR. GOETTEL: Well, why did you leave?
MR. ATWELL: Actually, my family would have staid longer. The heat and humidity hit
me awful hard. It was frequently in the nineties with real high humidity all of the time.
The security was a bit of a problem.
MR. GOETTEL: You mean your personal security?
MR. ATWELL: Yes. I didn’t mind it. I never felt as though I would probably get shot,
in the field. Although I know one time when I was riding along with my Philippine
driver, I was alone in the car with him. We pulled up to an intersection and stopped and
all of a sudden he looked at me. His eyes got big, and I knew that something was right
beside me. I looked around, and I was looking into a machine gun. I looked across the
way, and there was an armored personnel carrier with their gun focused right on us, and
come to find out, a few hours before, there was a vehicle driving down the International
Highway near Taluk with eight or ten people in it. And the anti-government forces,
forced it over to the side, lined everybody up and shot them, right there on the highway.
So they were checking us out, I couldn’t fault them for that. It was not unusual for
people to get shot.
MR. GOETTEL: By the rebels, or the anti-government people?
MR. ATWELL: Yes, and all of the “strong men” had their own armies over there. And
there were many armies. Everybody was walking around with hand grenades and guns
and things. You didn’t know who was what!
MR. GOETTEL: Geez! No kidding?
MR. ATWELL: One evening we were coming back from working in one of our study
plots, and a dike had burst and the road was washed out. We couldn’t get across it at that
time. It was starting to get dusky. A group of men came down, about six or eight, came
down the highway, walking with firearms. You could tell who was the head of the group
because when they got to the water, two of the men made a chair with their arms and the
leader got on, and they carried him across. They came over and talked to our Philippine
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counterparts and said “Why are you here? At this time you should be out of here, it’s
getting dark. Your vehicle is just like a government vehicle, and we are setting up
roadblocks. We can’t tell you from the government”. They would send people out to us,
if we were in a village that we hadn’t been to before, and we were out working in the
fields. There would be somebody out there checking us out right away. They knew who
we were, and what we were trying to do, to help the farmers. So they were very
supportive. But when they were going to do somebody in, they weren’t very particular
about who was close by. If this person was walking across the road, there would just be a
hail of gunfire. They would get that person, and maybe two or three others besides.
MR. GOETTEL: Wow! What year was this again?
MR. ATWELL: I got there in 1969, and staid for 1970 and 1971. I worried more about
my family when I was away. They had demonstrations down in the village, and we
would hear gunfire from the house where the government troops were stopping the
demonstrators. Sometimes, on the campus there at the University of the Philippines,
College of Agriculture, the students would be demonstrating. My family might go out for
groceries on the military base and then they couldn’t get back in. The students wouldn’t
let them back in. Things like this, so I was concerned mainly about the family. The
people were basically good to us, but if you got in the wrong situation at the wrong time
you could have some pretty serious consequences. It’s hard to believe, but they had
headhunters that were still active over there in the Sierra Madre, not that far from us. I
remember the first time I read about it in the newspaper, the first spring that we were
there. It said, “Flame trees are in blossom now”. That means that the such and such tribe
will be after heads because the groom has to present a Christian head to his prospective
father-in-law before he can get married. I said, “Oh yeah, sure”. And I’ll be darned, the
next week, three government foresters, who went up in their Jeep up into the Sierra
Madre Mountains didn’t come back. A government force went up, and they found them.
All three were still sitting right in their Jeep with no heads! If there weren’t enough
fishermen, or people who went up into the mountains, to supply heads, they would
occasionally make a foray down into the valleys and pick them up that way.
MR. GOETTEL: Geez! [Stunned amazement]
MR. ATWELL: I think somebody wrote a book about it when I was over there. I think
that the title of it was something like, “What’s That in the Road, A Head”? [Laughing]
Anyways, that was really strange! Justiniano Labye, the fellow that I worked with and I,
did some fine things together. He was interested in the out=of-doors. We went down
into Mindanao to take pictures of Fruit Bats one time, over a long weekend. We went
into a roost that I estimated was about thirty to thirty-five thousand Fruit Bats. I don’t
think anybody had even been in to take pictures before.
MR. GOETTEL: Those are fairly large bats too, aren’t they?
MR ATWELL: Yes, these were huge.
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MR GOETTEL: Aren’t they called the “Flying Foxes”?
MR. ATWELL: Yeah. That is the same thing. I forget the scientific name. But we did
things like that. He knew a fellow, a doctor, who would once a year, go up into the Sierra
Madres to treat some of the headhunters in a particular village, with certain medicines
that they needed. So they allowed him, and looked forward to him coming in. And you
had to go along ways up the east side of the Sierra Madres on the ocean in a boat, which
is called a “bonka”. There were no roads or anything. They would meet him in a pre-designated
spot and escort him back up into the mountains. This friend I had said that he
thought that he could maybe get that doctor to agree to have us go up with him. And it
was one of the things that we just never got around to doing. I thought, “Wow, can you
imagine that?” What an opportunity that would have been! We did do some other things
that were just unbelievable. He was just a wonderful person to be with. Unfortunately, a
lot of these people are no longer with us. This is really sad. But anyways, we were really
pleased with the work that we did with the rats.
MR. GOETTEL: Why are they “no longer with us”?
MR. ATWELL: They’re dead. They died.
MR. GOETTEL: From normal causes?
MR. ATWELL: Yeah.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, I see. I thought that you meant that there was some sort of
problem.
MR. ATWELL: No. The only fellow that I knew personally, who died of violence was
my barber over there.
MR. GOETTEL: This has got to be a joke, right?
MR. ATWELL: No! This is the truth! [Laughing]
MR. GOETTEL: I can’t believe you had a barber.
MR. ATWELL: I am bald, and pretty much have been for a long time. But I went to this
barber, and I would go about once a week, and he would shave my head. And he had a
knife on his belt. And I commented on it one time. I said, “That’s a nice looking knife”.
He says, “Oh, very sharp, yes, yes. Look at this”! So he shaved my head with his knife!
He skinned it up a bit I’ve got to admit. But we had a good personal relationship and I
really liked him. One of the first times I went there, he asked me if I would like some
wine. I thought, “O. K. what the heck, I’ll have a glass of wine. It’s late in the day”. So
he came in with a large fruit glass, full of whiskey. I found out that they called whiskey
“wine” at that time. You have to drink, and well as eat everything there so that you are
not impolite. They expect to you. So that was my last time to order “wine”. He got into
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politics, unfortunately. And evidently he was doing too well, because somebody went up
to the window of his neepa hut one night and shot him, and killed him. I had to get a new
barber. But there are all kinds of things that I could tell you about the Philippines. I
really loved the people. So few foreigners, at that time, were getting into the southern
Philippines. The other researchers went into a southern village; I wasn’t with them, but
they were the first Americans that had come into that area since Liberation in 1945. They
let all of the schools out. And everybody in the whole village area came out and talked to
the Americans. They wanted to shake hands and thank them. It was amazing. It was a
nice time to be there. We went down to the southern Philippines were the Morhos, the
ones that are causing so much of a problem right now; some of the Muslims and the like,
with the kidnappings and the like. They were a little different. They didn’t smile as
much, and they wore headbands. They were pleasant, and we would go off and do our
own stuff. When were doing our research, we would divide up into different villages,
and things and I never felt threatened. It was difficult to sleep at night because they have
their prayers. And every hour, on the hour, they had loudspeaker set up. You’d be asleep
and all of a sudden, it was just, oh my goodness, it was just magnified prayers!
[Impersonating Muslim prayers loudly] It would just lift you right up, every hour, all
night. I don’t know if they can sleep through that, or if they get up and say their prayers
too, or what.
MR. GOETTEL: How did your work with the Rice Rats go then?
MR. ATWELL: It went real well. We found a way to basically manage them. We found
out that a toxicant, Zinc Phosphide, when it was presented at a certain time when the
population was low, combined with keeping the habitat at a minimum, in other words,
clearing up areas that were brushy and grassy helped. You could make severe inroads
into the population so that it would be much smaller and the damage was much less. That
worked out.
MR. GOETTEL: How did you get them to take the Zinc Phosphide?
MR. ATWELL: It would be presented in small banana-leaf packets. You cut a small
piece of banana-leaf, put a few grains of rice with the Zinc Phosphide on it in the packet.
Then you would take a little piece of grass an tie it up. You would then roast it, just a
little bit for flavor, strangely enough. These would be put out in the rice patties during a
time of the year when the population was naturally fairly low. Then, it worked real well.
MR. GOETTEL: And you developed that, you and your team?
MR. ATWELL: Yes. And things worked out so well that I know a few years after we
left, they increased the scope of the Research Center to make it regional, throughout that
part of Southeast Asia. It was much larger. But I haven’t heard for years now, on how
they were doing.
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MR. GOETTEL: I thought you were going to say that they work so well that they were
on the endangered species list! So the Cobras would probably eat the Rice Rats too, huh?
That’s probably why they were there.
MR ATWELL: Oh yeah, that’s why they were there.
MR. GOETTEL: I’ll be darned.
MR. ATWELL: I guess we should have managed for more Cobras, but we didn’t!
[Joking]

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1
INTERVIEW WITH GETTY ATWELL
BY THOMAS GOETTEL JUNE 20, 2001
MR. GOETTEL: It’s June 20, 2001 and we are at Gerry Atwell’s house in Searsmont,
Maine. Gerry is a long-time Fish and Wildlife Service employee, now retired. He is a
Biologist. It’s a beautiful summer day here. We are overlooking his small farm, or his
medium farm, I guess and his pond, hummingbirds and Lupines, and everything. So
Gerry, I know that you are from Framingham, Massachusetts.
MR. ATWELL: Yes.
MR. GOETTEL: How did you get into wildlife? How did you start off in your career?
MR. ATWELL: Well, in Framingham when I was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s it
was a rural situation, unlike what Framingham is today. I spent a lot of time, as soon as I
could walk, out in the woods, or around ponds and streams around our home. My folks
encouraged my interest in wildlife. My Dad built me a special cage for snakes, and we
had an old bathtub, which we sunk into the ground out in back for turtles. I had
Salamanders and the whole works. It was awful easy to continue that interest. I can still
remember the day that my folks told me that they had learned about a situation where the
states used people that were called Biologists, and you went to school for it. I was about,
maybe twelve years old at the time so that really sparked an interest in me. Through my
high school years I worked and took classes that were designed so that I could go on to
college, which I did, at the University of Massachusetts. In 1954, I graduated with
bachelors in Wildlife Management, and went into the Service [military], as a tank unit
commander with the First Armored Division. After a couple of years there, I came back
out and tried to get a job in wildlife, in Massachusetts. At that time, the head of the
wildlife section told me that they weren’t hiring any wildlife biologists at the time, but
they were going to bring on some fisheries biologists the next spring. He suggested that I
get some fisheries courses. I called up the University of Massachusetts and told them
what the situation was, and they said, “Sure, come on back up to graduate school.” So,
two days later, I was up there at the graduate school. I took fisheries courses there in
1956, and 1957. But then I realized through one of the professors that I was working
with, Tom Andrews, (he was a wonderful person). He encouraged me to go on for a
master’s degree. I decided that I would, but rather than fisheries I was interested in
upland, or big game. I ended up going to the University of Montana to work with John
Craighead at the Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit there in a study involving Magpie
predation on Pheasants in the Bitterroot Valley. I did that for two years, and I got my
master’s in December of 1959, and took a position in the Alaska Depart of Fish and
Game as the Assistant Regional Management Biologist in Anchorage. The staff was very
small at that time. The office for the whole region, and there were three regions in the
state, was two enforcement officers and about four or five biologists, plus the secretaries.
Two or three of the Biologists were fisheries biologists; they were divided into
commercial fisheries and sport fisheries. We had a small group of people, but it was
tremendously interesting. It seemed that no sooner had I arrived than I was made
responsible for the first, either-sex Moose season on the Kenai Peninsula for years and
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years and years. That really got my attention because I had to coordinate this particular
hunt with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Alaska Command, the military. It
was a pretty big operation and I was real nervous, but it went well. It was a good hunt.
Quite a large number of animals were taken under fairly severe conditions. People were
hunting at twenty [degrees] below. They were local people of course, so they knew how
to take care of themselves in that type of weather, so it worked out well. We had a lot of
challenges, and in wasn’t long before I was the acting Regional Management Biologist.
From there I went to be the State Biologist for Moose, in Alaska. I traveled over much of
the state, and it was extremely interesting. We had all kinds of different experiences. I
did a lot of flying, of course.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you fly, yourself?
MR. ATWELL: No. I never did. I had a problem with kidney stones, which I still have
to this day. And as you well know. . .
MR. GOETTEL: I seem to remember that.
MR ATWELL: I can be O.K. one minute, and not so great the next. So I wouldn’t make
a good pilot in that respect. But I did do a lot of flying, and game counts. We’d get sex
and age composition counts of Moose each fall, and we’d count several thousand Moose.
We were quite good and sexing and aging them from the air.
MR. GOETTEL: Aging them too?
MR. ATWELL: Yes, within reason. I mean, we could say whether they were adults, or
calves or yearlings and that sort of thing. I was never in a plane that had any real serious
problems. Some of our people crashed landed, and we couldn’t contact them for several
hours and we were real concerned about that. The plane was destroyed, but they came
out of it all right, with no serious injuries. I know a time I went down to the McNeal
River. It is a state-owned area where the Brown Bears congregate in the summer when
the Salmon are going upstream. At that time, we’re talking about 1960, there was hardly
anybody coming in to watch them. Now I guess you have to make reservations a year or
two in advance, and it is very strictly controlled. I was just dropped off there, by a fellow
in an airplane and there was a Stream Guard. Stream Guards were people who were
summer hires by the State, to monitor fishing streams, particularly the mouths of rivers
where commercial fishing boats could come in and really create havoc taking fish as they
were about ready to migrate up the rivers. The fish would congregate there. The
fishermen could wipe out practically a whole run, so they had to be watched. There was
a fellow there who was a Stream Guard, he had a little cabin, and I staid with him for a
week. It was tremendously interesting for me. It was the first time, other than in
Yellowstone with the Craigheads that I had been around big Bears. There were
sometimes thirty or forty Bears at one time at the falls. We would meet them on the trails
and paths. It was just extremely interesting work. I had a lot of interesting projects.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you have any close calls with the Bears at all?
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MR. ATWELL: Not there. I did later, on Kodiak. But when you are around them a lot,
you get to know what to look for, and they give you body language and certain sounds
that mean that maybe they are upset and you want to back away. I carried a 357 Magnum
with me at that time. One day, the Stream Guard and I decided that we were going to
have some Salmon for supper. We went up the river a ways, and waded out. We had hip
boots on, and were fishing to catch Salmon. I heard him say, “Hey, Gerry, I think you’d
better get you gun out”! I looked over my shoulder, and here was two cubs, just running
lickety-split right towards us. We were evidently in their favorite fishing spot. They
were cubs of a year, and the female was coming up behind them. She saw us but the cubs
didn’t. She wanted to get between us and the cubs. So she was barreling right in at us.
There was no way that I would use that pistol to try stop the Bear at all. I did take it out,
as I recall. I was going to shoot up into the air if I had to. We just backed up into the
water where it was deeper and once she between the cubs and us, she was fine. She just
herded them along. But that was the only instance there. One day I walked down the
beach, by myself. There was a huge pile of boulders that fallen off of the cliffs nearby.
These boulders were half the size of a good-sized house and there was just a huge mound
of them. The tide was out, and I was walking along there, and all of a sudden this mighty
roar came out! [Makes a Bear roaring sound] It was like a domestic Bull. I didn’t realize
it, but there were two, two year old cubs that were littermates that were in amongst these
boulders. They were just playing and one of them roared at the other. I couldn’t see
them and so that got my attention real fast. But they never came out. I did see them later
in the day. They came up the beach, and I assumed that it was the same Bears. They are
just not that aggressive. They are easy to get along with. They have people now that go
up to the McNeal Falls, and I don’t know how many people a year because it’s such a big
thing. They are limited, I think by permit. But I know of no instances up there, where
people have been hurt by the Bears. I worked later on Kodiak, and when I was there in
the 1970s there were only a couple of instances on record of people being hurt by the
Bears. They were just minor situations like when a trapper walked out into a stream
where a sow with cubs was feeding and he just walked right out of the Elders and he was
right on the Bears. The sow turned around and slapped him, and knocked him down.
She opened up his arm a little bit, and bit into the pack on his back and walked away.
Then a few years later, a fourteen or fifteen year old fellow was out hunting deer. He was
hunting upwind near a Salmon stream. And again, he walked onto a sow with cubs. She
knocked him down, and bit him once and walked away. I think he was in the hospital
overnight. But that’s pretty amazing, with that tall grass and all that, and people are
walking through that all of the time. We were around the Bears a lot, every day pretty
much, when we were in the field. Again, they are just like people. Each one has it’s own
personality. And if there is one that is a rough and tough three-year-old, then you’re
going to kind of give him birth. Most of the older ones have been around people to some
extent and they back off, or they come at you, and you back off. The only real spooky
time I had was once I was coming out of the mountains by myself, and I didn’t have a
gun with me. There were just some Elders and Willows around and there was an opening
about fifty or sixty yards long. There was a bear towards the other end of the opening
where I wanted to go. I yelled at him to get his attention so he would get out of the way,
so that I could go by. Well, he ran at me, and normally if they do that you just wave your
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arms and yell, and they’ll stop. I did that, and he didn’t stop. He kept coming, and
another one came behind him, so there were two running at me. I thought, “Well, this is
going to look great”. I was Refuge Manager at Kodiak at the time, and I could see it the
newspapers. You know, “Refuge Manager Gets Mauled by a Bear”! That was the last
thing that I wanted. So I turned around, and looked over my shoulder. There was a little
opening in the willows behind me. There was a ditch, just before they would get to me,
and I thought that when they got to that ditch, I would turn around and go back to that
opening and yell again. And if they continue on I’ll just roll up in a ball. So I ran back,
and whirled around, and they went roaring down into that ditch and they didn’t come out.
I couldn’t believe it. I staid there for a few seconds, I didn’t yell any more! I just turned
around and walked away, rather fast. It kind of unnerved me a little bit. But that was the
only time felt concerned out of all of the time we were around bears. I had other ones run
at me, but they were “bluff” charges. And this one, at the time, didn’t seem that it was a
bluff charge. It was during the breeding season, so I think it was a male with a female,
and he was guarding the female and didn’t want me around. No, there was no problem
with the bears. Although people have been killed by them, and I guess there always will
be [problems] unfortunately. Because we’re in his or her habitat, and as I say, each bear
is an individual and has an individual psychological makeup. There’s going to be ones
that are going to be more aggressive.
With the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, we worked on Moose each spring.
From helicopters, we would tag about two hundred calves each spring. We wanted to
follow a certain population in the [sounds like] Matanuska valley. I learned very quickly
then, that each of them is a different animal too. Because some of the cows, as soon as
they heard the helicopter, would run and leave the calf. Then there were some who, no
matter how big the helicopter was, even if we used a huge military Skorskis, with two
blades, one on each end, they wouldn’t leave. They’d just turn around, and pivot on their
hind feet and paw at the helicopter, even though it was fifteen, or twenty times bigger
than the Moose. We learned to just leave those Moose alone. Most of them would just
run a short distance when the helicopter came in. The calf would drop and we’d jump
out. But you had to jump into the muskeg. The helicopter couldn’t land because it was
so wet. Then you would try to run through the muskeg and catch the calf. When the calf
was less than a week old you could normally catch it without too much of a problem. But
you got awful tired; we would start at about two o’clock in the morning. This was around
the 25th, 26th or 27th of May when most of the Moose calves were being dropped and were
available to us. We had a military newspaper correspondent type person come out with
us one morning. He wanted some pictures, and he had his camera slung over his back.
We started to chase a calf after we jumped out of the helicopter, and I looked behind me
to see how he was doing, and just as I did, he tripped and he went headfirst into the mud.
His camera, I remember, came flying up over his head into the water. He never asked to
come back again. A lot of people thought that it was going to be fun. In a sense it was,
but it was very fatiguing. And after about the second of third Moose calf, we would
frequently loose our breakfast, because we were just so tired and using so much strength
up. It worked very well, and we learned a lot about that particular population through the
calves that we tagged.
5
MR. GOETTEL: So you darted them from the helicopter?
MR. ATWELL: No. We just ran them down. We started a new population too, down at
Burnis Bay with a few of the calves. It was an area that was cut off by glaciers and there
was no Moose population. It is in southeastern Alaska in the panhandle. We took with
the help of the National Guard, twelve Moose calves down there and it worked extremely
well. They were liberated there after being partially raised. They have a fine population
of Moose down there now, and they have for quite a while.
MR. GOETTEL: Do you want me to let her in? [Opening door for Mr. Atwell’s pet] You
said that there were only four or five biologists for your area. That must have been a
huge area.
MR. ATWELL: Yeah, it was. I don’t know how many thousands of square miles. I
know that we worked with Wolves too, but it was mainly just a census thing. I know of
one Wolf study area we had was twenty-six thousand square miles. They were big areas.
There were three Regional Management Biologists at that time in the state. There was
one for the Artic, one for the central and one for the southern part of Alaska. I happened
to be working in the central area with included the Aleutians. It was a tremendous area.
We had to fly because there just weren’t that many roads. So we did a lot of flying.
MR. GOETTEL: So you did wolf work too?
MR. ATWELL: Just census work. The populations were pretty low then because there
was a bounty of fifty dollars a head on them. In addition, the Service and hit them pretty
hard with poison for a number of years. But they did come back. I worked for the Fish
and Wildlife Service quite a bit on census work, down on the Kenai. I working with
them on the hunting and fishing regulations each year, and management. Dave Spencer
was Refuge Manager at Kenai at the time, and I’d meet with them once or twice a year,
and discuss what regulation we would work up affecting the refuge. That was such a
large area too. One year we decided to make it illegal to hunt wolves down there and in a
sense, it didn’t help right away because there were no wolves. They had been extirpated
from the Kenai. But after a few years, the wolves had found their way back in and we
built up a good Wolf population down there. Since then there have been several detailed,
lengthy studies on Wolves in Kenai. But anyways, I could go on and on talking about my
work with the Alaska Fish and Game Department. Jim Brooks was my immediate
supervisor most of the time. He was an extremely talented and dedicated person. I think
he left home when he was about fifteen or sixteen, and rode a freight car out west and
ended up in Alaska. He was just an amazing person. Much of the big and small game
management that was accomplished can be attributed to his direction.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you work much with the native populations?
MR. ATWELL: No. I didn’t. I did on Kodiak, but not when I was working out of
Anchorage. I left there in September of 1963, and went back to Montana. I took a
position as an Assistant Unit Leader with John Craighead, at the Montana Cooperative
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Wildlife Research Unit at Missoula, Montana. That was very enjoyable too, because I
had known John from my graduate work. Much of my responsibility was with graduate
students, and with the administration of the Unit. I also worked some in research. I had
an Elk project in Yellowstone Park with the north Yellowstone Elk herd. I was
determining their summer range. That was extremely interesting. When I was down
there for summers; you’d just take a pack on your back and leave on a Monday and come
back on a Friday or Saturday. We would just go out and be with the Elk. We had
marked Elk with color-coded collars. We could individually identify an Elk with these
collars. Much of the time, that’s what I was doing. Once in a while I would take a
graduate student with me or maybe a student from another country, we had quite a few
from Africa. These were students who were interested in wildlife, and taking wildlife
courses, so they would accompany me. It wasn’t a real sophisticated study. It was sort of
like the old naturalist type studies where you get out with the animals and live with them.
There wasn’t any electronics involved, but we got a lot of good information and mapped
the summer ranges. I was pleased with that. I would work at times with John and Frank
Craighead on the Grizzly Bear work in Yellowstone. I had been to Yellowstone in 1947
and 1948, and it’s always been a very special place to me. I go back there as much as I
can. I was there last fall, and it’s just like going home. My wife Linda feels that same
way about it. She’s been there enough. It’s a wonderful spot, just fantastic. I remember
one time when I had the weekend off, and on Saturday I went down in the Haden Valley.
I just put a pack on, and took a lunch for the day. I also took camera equipment. I was
walking along, and I saw a Grizzly coming towards me across Sagebrush flat. With the
wind direction, I knew that he was going to get my scent before long. I set up my 400
mm telephoto lens on a tripod and followed him in. And sure enough, all of a sudden he
just stopped, dead in his tracks, and stood up on his hind legs. I was able to take a picture
of him. I liked that. And then he turned around and of course he ran like crazy. That
same day, and this was in the summer time, I think it was in July; I could see a wall of
white coming across the Haden Valley. I thought, “Oh boy, we’re in for a real shower”.
There was a thermal pool, or a stream actually, near by. I took out my thermometer and
followed the stream until it was about 106 or 106 degrees and took off my clothes and put
them under my poncho and got in the stream and laid back. The rain came, only it wasn’t
rain, it was snow. It was snowing and snowing like crazy! And I was in there for about
an hour, and there was about three inches of snow. I said, “Well, this is absurd. I’ve got
to walk out of here”! But the last thing that I wanted to do was to get out of that nice,
warm water in that snowstorm. Well, I figured that I had about five or six mile to walk
out so I had to do it. And I could feel each and every one of those snowflakes hit me
when I got out. {Laughing] So I was a little wet. I walked out, and came up on some Elk
that were bedded down and I didn’t even see them until they all stood up because they
were all covered by snow. You can get snow in Yellowstone any month of the year
although normally you don’t get that much at that time of the year.
But you are up seven or eight thousand feet. [Above sea level] I enjoyed working at the
University of Montana very much. They had great people there. Les Bengali and just a
whole bunch of fine people were there. I knew quite a few people in the Bitterroot
Valley. Linda and I are still friends with a rancher there. We just saw him last year. He
is just like a member of the family, a wonderful person. He has people up at Nine Mile
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that have a ranch. I guess you make friends as you move. And with the Service, and with
the State government, I moved quite a bit.
In 1968, I took a position in the Philippines. They were starting the Rodent Research
Center on Las Bagnios, about thirty miles east of Manila. It was adjacent to the
International Rice Research Institute. There were three of us from the States. There was
Nelson Swank, who was the Supervisor. He was a control=methods biologist. And there
was Keith Lavoie, a toxicologist, and myself as an ecologist. We worked with Philippine
counterparts on the Rice Rats. The Rice Rats, at that time were taking about ten percent
of the national production of rice in the Philippines. We worked with Les Somangil, and
Justiniano Labye [names of Philippine nationals] who were wonderful Philippine people.
They were very gifted biologists and scientists. We had research studies in many parts of
the Philippines, and very early on realized of course that these rodents weren’t going to
be wiped out, or extirpated. They were going to be managed, as happens with most
wildlife species, that because of the particular situation have been labeled as pests.
Although these were fine little critters.
MR. GOETTEL: They were native rats?
MR. ATWELL: Yes. These animals lived on grasses at the edge of the jungle. And
there probably weren’t that many of them until about three thousand years ago when
people came in and started clearing the jungles and planting rice crops. Rice is grass of
course. The rats could live in the dikes and come out at night and feed on the rice. And
they did very well. Man had changed the environment and it suited the rats better. My
job pretty much was determining how far they would move in a night, or in a certain
period of time. And, how many litters they would have. And how large the litters would
be. We just studied when they were most active, when they would feed on the rice.
Actually, they would start to feed on the rice before the rice panicle came out, when it
was still in what’s called a booting stage. They could smell it, and sense that it was there.
They would feed on it before you’d even see the rice itself. They could do a lot of
damage in one night. We radioed them. We had small radios. We worked through the
Denver Wildlife Research Center, and they trained us in the use of all of this equipment.
We would be out at first light, depending on the particular project. One problem that we
had in the rice patties was Cobras. You never reached into a rat burrow, because that’s
where the Cobras would be. And they were Spitting Cobras, so if they did come out, you
didn’t want to harass them because they could eject their venom. They could
instinctively point it towards your face. It wouldn’t kill you if you got it in your eyes but
you could get some severe eye damage if you didn’t get it diluted right away. They
weren’t aggressive. Now, if you harassed them they were, but they just tried to get out of
your way. You could see them if the rice, or the grass would move and they would sense
that you were there. I always wore boots up to my knees. In fact, I’ve got them right
downstairs. I still use them. I call them my “Cobra Boots”.
MR. GOETTEL: Are they leather boots?
8
MR. ATWELL: No. Just a real thick rubber, and they weren’t specially made for that. I
bought them in a market over there and they were very well made. I had them on, just
yesterday out doing something around the yard, when it was still wet. Unfortunately the
Philippine people wouldn’t wear anything on their feet, maybe just some clogs. They
would go out at night, particularly if they were changing water depths in the patties. The
snakes were out more at night and they would step on them and things like that. One
time we had a new driver. You didn’t drive yourself, over there. You had government
drivers because of all of the problems you could get into if you were in an accident.
Some drivers were just extremely aggressive. It was just a whole different way of life.
We had a new driver from Manila, Vero Plant Industry. We came out and we were just
coming into the study area, and a fellow came staggering out. He had just been bitten by
a Cobra. It was evidently a while since it had happened, and he collapsed and later died.
That was the one time that the driver went out into the field. He refused to drive for us
any more. He went back to Manila. He was just with us one day. Most of the time you
didn’t have a problem. That was fairly unusual, although they do loose quite a few
people from snakebites from different kinds of snakes. We did carry anti venom with us
for a while, but it got to be too much of a problem. It had to be refrigerated, and it just
wasn’t something that we kept on doing. The Philippine people were great to work with.
We went off into villages, and they still remembered the Americans from liberation, and
they couldn’t do enough for you. The kids would run up beside your Jeep when you
came in. And they would be yelling, “Hey Joe, Hey Joe”! I remember one fellow who
worked with us for quite a while; he was probably about fifty years old then. And on his
chest, he had tattooed, “One by one Joe”. We asked him what that meant. He was a
guerilla from the Second World War. “Joe” was the United States soldier, and that they
had killed the Japanese, one by one. At that time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s I
wouldn’t have wanted to be a Japanese out in the villages, or out in the provinces. It
would not have been safe because of the terrible things that they did when they were
there. Our neighbors where we lived; her sister’s family was put into a small “neepa”
hut, and it was lit on fire. When they tried to run out, the Japanese shot all of the kids and
everyone else. One of our drivers, Anghel Razad [Philippine name] was put into a small
“neepa” hut with about thirty people; thirty other men. They were kept there for
something like three days without any water. And in that heat, some of the men were
drinking their own urine. These people didn’t have very good thoughts about the
Japanese.
MR. GOETTEL: What is a “neepa” hut?
MR. ATWELL: It’s made out of thatch, up off of the ground, frequently on stilts. It’s
made out of Palm branches. The people in the Philippines were just wonderful. It was
just a tremendous experience. My wife worked in a couple of the villages building up
libraries. They had no libraries, and she contacted people in the States and they sent in
all kinds of books. Education and books were so important to the people there. They
appreciated it so much. I know that when we left, they had a party for us in the
compound. And all of our friends from the local villages came in. Some of them were
elders, or older people, and some of them could not speak English. Most everywhere we
went in the Philippines, we could find people who spoke English. But anyway, they went
9
through a wailing process, the older people did. It was just unearthly. It was
unbelievable. The noises that these people, and the women made, the wailing. I have
never heard anything like it since.
MR. GOETTEL: That was because you were leaving?
MR. ATWELL: Yeah. And one of them had a poem that she wrote, and it was translated
for us. She wrote it in her mind, she didn’t have it on paper. And it just had our whole
family in tears. It was such a beautiful thing, and I just wish, I have always wished that
we could have somehow gotten a copy of that. It was just amazing. It was very difficult
for us to leave.
MR. GOETTEL: Well, why did you leave?
MR. ATWELL: Actually, my family would have staid longer. The heat and humidity hit
me awful hard. It was frequently in the nineties with real high humidity all of the time.
The security was a bit of a problem.
MR. GOETTEL: You mean your personal security?
MR. ATWELL: Yes. I didn’t mind it. I never felt as though I would probably get shot,
in the field. Although I know one time when I was riding along with my Philippine
driver, I was alone in the car with him. We pulled up to an intersection and stopped and
all of a sudden he looked at me. His eyes got big, and I knew that something was right
beside me. I looked around, and I was looking into a machine gun. I looked across the
way, and there was an armored personnel carrier with their gun focused right on us, and
come to find out, a few hours before, there was a vehicle driving down the International
Highway near Taluk with eight or ten people in it. And the anti-government forces,
forced it over to the side, lined everybody up and shot them, right there on the highway.
So they were checking us out, I couldn’t fault them for that. It was not unusual for
people to get shot.
MR. GOETTEL: By the rebels, or the anti-government people?
MR. ATWELL: Yes, and all of the “strong men” had their own armies over there. And
there were many armies. Everybody was walking around with hand grenades and guns
and things. You didn’t know who was what!
MR. GOETTEL: Geez! No kidding?
MR. ATWELL: One evening we were coming back from working in one of our study
plots, and a dike had burst and the road was washed out. We couldn’t get across it at that
time. It was starting to get dusky. A group of men came down, about six or eight, came
down the highway, walking with firearms. You could tell who was the head of the group
because when they got to the water, two of the men made a chair with their arms and the
leader got on, and they carried him across. They came over and talked to our Philippine
10
counterparts and said “Why are you here? At this time you should be out of here, it’s
getting dark. Your vehicle is just like a government vehicle, and we are setting up
roadblocks. We can’t tell you from the government”. They would send people out to us,
if we were in a village that we hadn’t been to before, and we were out working in the
fields. There would be somebody out there checking us out right away. They knew who
we were, and what we were trying to do, to help the farmers. So they were very
supportive. But when they were going to do somebody in, they weren’t very particular
about who was close by. If this person was walking across the road, there would just be a
hail of gunfire. They would get that person, and maybe two or three others besides.
MR. GOETTEL: Wow! What year was this again?
MR. ATWELL: I got there in 1969, and staid for 1970 and 1971. I worried more about
my family when I was away. They had demonstrations down in the village, and we
would hear gunfire from the house where the government troops were stopping the
demonstrators. Sometimes, on the campus there at the University of the Philippines,
College of Agriculture, the students would be demonstrating. My family might go out for
groceries on the military base and then they couldn’t get back in. The students wouldn’t
let them back in. Things like this, so I was concerned mainly about the family. The
people were basically good to us, but if you got in the wrong situation at the wrong time
you could have some pretty serious consequences. It’s hard to believe, but they had
headhunters that were still active over there in the Sierra Madre, not that far from us. I
remember the first time I read about it in the newspaper, the first spring that we were
there. It said, “Flame trees are in blossom now”. That means that the such and such tribe
will be after heads because the groom has to present a Christian head to his prospective
father-in-law before he can get married. I said, “Oh yeah, sure”. And I’ll be darned, the
next week, three government foresters, who went up in their Jeep up into the Sierra
Madre Mountains didn’t come back. A government force went up, and they found them.
All three were still sitting right in their Jeep with no heads! If there weren’t enough
fishermen, or people who went up into the mountains, to supply heads, they would
occasionally make a foray down into the valleys and pick them up that way.
MR. GOETTEL: Geez! [Stunned amazement]
MR. ATWELL: I think somebody wrote a book about it when I was over there. I think
that the title of it was something like, “What’s That in the Road, A Head”? [Laughing]
Anyways, that was really strange! Justiniano Labye, the fellow that I worked with and I,
did some fine things together. He was interested in the out=of-doors. We went down
into Mindanao to take pictures of Fruit Bats one time, over a long weekend. We went
into a roost that I estimated was about thirty to thirty-five thousand Fruit Bats. I don’t
think anybody had even been in to take pictures before.
MR. GOETTEL: Those are fairly large bats too, aren’t they?
MR ATWELL: Yes, these were huge.
11
MR GOETTEL: Aren’t they called the “Flying Foxes”?
MR. ATWELL: Yeah. That is the same thing. I forget the scientific name. But we did
things like that. He knew a fellow, a doctor, who would once a year, go up into the Sierra
Madres to treat some of the headhunters in a particular village, with certain medicines
that they needed. So they allowed him, and looked forward to him coming in. And you
had to go along ways up the east side of the Sierra Madres on the ocean in a boat, which
is called a “bonka”. There were no roads or anything. They would meet him in a pre-designated
spot and escort him back up into the mountains. This friend I had said that he
thought that he could maybe get that doctor to agree to have us go up with him. And it
was one of the things that we just never got around to doing. I thought, “Wow, can you
imagine that?” What an opportunity that would have been! We did do some other things
that were just unbelievable. He was just a wonderful person to be with. Unfortunately, a
lot of these people are no longer with us. This is really sad. But anyways, we were really
pleased with the work that we did with the rats.
MR. GOETTEL: Why are they “no longer with us”?
MR. ATWELL: They’re dead. They died.
MR. GOETTEL: From normal causes?
MR. ATWELL: Yeah.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, I see. I thought that you meant that there was some sort of
problem.
MR. ATWELL: No. The only fellow that I knew personally, who died of violence was
my barber over there.
MR. GOETTEL: This has got to be a joke, right?
MR. ATWELL: No! This is the truth! [Laughing]
MR. GOETTEL: I can’t believe you had a barber.
MR. ATWELL: I am bald, and pretty much have been for a long time. But I went to this
barber, and I would go about once a week, and he would shave my head. And he had a
knife on his belt. And I commented on it one time. I said, “That’s a nice looking knife”.
He says, “Oh, very sharp, yes, yes. Look at this”! So he shaved my head with his knife!
He skinned it up a bit I’ve got to admit. But we had a good personal relationship and I
really liked him. One of the first times I went there, he asked me if I would like some
wine. I thought, “O. K. what the heck, I’ll have a glass of wine. It’s late in the day”. So
he came in with a large fruit glass, full of whiskey. I found out that they called whiskey
“wine” at that time. You have to drink, and well as eat everything there so that you are
not impolite. They expect to you. So that was my last time to order “wine”. He got into
12
politics, unfortunately. And evidently he was doing too well, because somebody went up
to the window of his neepa hut one night and shot him, and killed him. I had to get a new
barber. But there are all kinds of things that I could tell you about the Philippines. I
really loved the people. So few foreigners, at that time, were getting into the southern
Philippines. The other researchers went into a southern village; I wasn’t with them, but
they were the first Americans that had come into that area since Liberation in 1945. They
let all of the schools out. And everybody in the whole village area came out and talked to
the Americans. They wanted to shake hands and thank them. It was amazing. It was a
nice time to be there. We went down to the southern Philippines were the Morhos, the
ones that are causing so much of a problem right now; some of the Muslims and the like,
with the kidnappings and the like. They were a little different. They didn’t smile as
much, and they wore headbands. They were pleasant, and we would go off and do our
own stuff. When were doing our research, we would divide up into different villages,
and things and I never felt threatened. It was difficult to sleep at night because they have
their prayers. And every hour, on the hour, they had loudspeaker set up. You’d be asleep
and all of a sudden, it was just, oh my goodness, it was just magnified prayers!
[Impersonating Muslim prayers loudly] It would just lift you right up, every hour, all
night. I don’t know if they can sleep through that, or if they get up and say their prayers
too, or what.
MR. GOETTEL: How did your work with the Rice Rats go then?
MR. ATWELL: It went real well. We found a way to basically manage them. We found
out that a toxicant, Zinc Phosphide, when it was presented at a certain time when the
population was low, combined with keeping the habitat at a minimum, in other words,
clearing up areas that were brushy and grassy helped. You could make severe inroads
into the population so that it would be much smaller and the damage was much less. That
worked out.
MR. GOETTEL: How did you get them to take the Zinc Phosphide?
MR. ATWELL: It would be presented in small banana-leaf packets. You cut a small
piece of banana-leaf, put a few grains of rice with the Zinc Phosphide on it in the packet.
Then you would take a little piece of grass an tie it up. You would then roast it, just a
little bit for flavor, strangely enough. These would be put out in the rice patties during a
time of the year when the population was naturally fairly low. Then, it worked real well.
MR. GOETTEL: And you developed that, you and your team?
MR. ATWELL: Yes. And things worked out so well that I know a few years after we
left, they increased the scope of the Research Center to make it regional, throughout that
part of Southeast Asia. It was much larger. But I haven’t heard for years now, on how
they were doing.
13
MR. GOETTEL: I thought you were going to say that they work so well that they were
on the endangered species list! So the Cobras would probably eat the Rice Rats too, huh?
That’s probably why they were there.
MR ATWELL: Oh yeah, that’s why they were there.
MR. GOETTEL: I’ll be darned.
MR. ATWELL: I guess we should have managed for more Cobras, but we didn’t!
[Joking]